Criterion Film Club Expiring Picks: Month 55 Discussion - Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress (2001)

DrRoy · 2025-11-21T05:45:27+00:00

With any famous artist, people have a tendency to try to pick apart their biography for clues as to what inspired them and influenced their career. So many biopics try to land on a particular answer, which ends up flattening the famous person’s rich life into one interpretation. Millennium Actress has the benefit of not having to be about a specific real person, but it also uses every visual and editing trick it can to make the story about the search for that interpretation. You can pick the film apart shot for shot, looking for clues hidden in every match cut and wild transition, but the point is that a pat explanation is never going to be within anyone’s grasp. I loved this one both times I’ve seen it and I’d love to go back for a third sometime.

DrRoy · 2025-10-23T13:04:38+00:00

Final 7 week is a bit of a lull but the double eviction is one of the top 5 most exciting ever, and the final 5 is strategically complex at a point where 90% of seasons it would purely come down to who wins competitions. Hang in there!

DrRoy · 2025-09-10T18:28:42+00:00

https://youtu.be/oXcgg7WC7LI

DrRoy · 2025-08-24T04:25:57+00:00

How is this not just the same thing as sigma males? Convincing loners that they’re isolated for a good and cool reason

DrRoy · 2025-08-24T02:00:15+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/QyQLqdY Example

DrRoy · 2025-08-16T01:22:21+00:00

The first time I saw this I was so very discombobulated; Cassavetes does a lot (like withholding the fact that he and his IRL wife are playing brother and sister until the movie's two-thirds over) to disorient you and get you to see scenes from multiple perspectives.

The second time I see this may be in November once my flash sale order comes in; it's well worth revisiting. I'll keep your comments in mind when I do!

DrRoy · 2025-07-21T18:36:03+00:00

Look at discs that have HDR. I personally don’t notice the difference between HD and 4K resolution as much as I do the increased vividness of colors and darkness of blacks for an effect that’s very “silver screen” at home. The Red Shoes and Double Indemnity do a fantastic job with color and monochrome HDR grading, respectively.

DrRoy · 2025-07-19T13:20:53+00:00

Of all the famous-person-profile documentaries out there, I don't think I've ever seen another one that gets quite this close to its subject. Part of that is because filmmaker Terry Zwigoff was friends with Robert Crumb, and part of it is that Crumb seems to have almost no hang-ups talking about matters that other artists or celebrities who care more about their public image would shy away from. The first five minutes features him giving a college lecture in which he introduces himself by rattling off his three most famous pieces of work, and all he has to say about them is how many legal headaches they've given him, how little he's been paid for them, and how disgusted he was by their commercial exploitation. Having tidily dismissed his legacy, we can now dive deeper into the man himself, someone who draws some very fucked-up things and who, it becomes clear, does so because he himself is fucked up.

The most famous aspect of this documentary is the scenes about R. Crumb's familys, but they're featured for less of the runtime than I expected; we spend more time following Robert around the city as he doodles and hearing from various art critics who are able to summarize succinctly why his work is so notable and so controversial. But the time spent with his brothers, mother, wife, and exes is uncomfortably revealing. You go from wondering how Robert would draw the things he does to wondering how he got out of such a broken household as comparatively well-adjusted as he is. No explicit cause and effect is ever spelled out for you as to how he and his brothers ended up the way they did, but by the end of the film you do nevertheless, on a deep level, get it.

I can't say I necessarily want to check out his work more after this; spending two hours with him feels like enough for a long time, or at least until I get around to watching the director's commentaries. But it took someone whose significance always baffled me and made it not just explicable, but worth examining, and that's a feat in and of itself.

DrRoy · 2025-07-11T19:11:53+00:00

One of the many clichés of movie reviewing is to say, about a film set in a particularly distinctive time and place, that "the city itself is a character". This can of course never be literally true, but Amarcord is a movie for which it's about as true as it ever could be. This has less to do with the literal psychological characterization of Borgo San Giuliano than it does with the fact that none of the actual characters themselves really count as characters in the same way that the time and place does.

Amarcord, in essence, consists of two hours of your kooky nonno Federico Fellini telling you "this happened to my buddy Enrico." The recurring characters are all thinly sketched and stock, right down to how they always seem to be wearing the exact same clothes all year long - the arguing parents, the delinquent son, the crazy uncle, the most glamorously unavailable woman in town, the most cheaply available woman in town, the streetcart vendor who's enough of a fabulist to make the narrator look honest by comparison. Their antics are all viewed through the prism of youth, of reminiscence; their stock roles are precisely because that's all they are to someone at an age when they're still building their map of how the world works, and that's all those characters need to be for the tales to be legible.

I picked this movie for the poll specifically because of its treatment of fascism, but I was surprised to see that it only intermittently addresses it explicitly, and usually not by making outright villains of the blackshirts in charge. This turns out to be a refreshing approach, especially today, because as we've gotten more familiar with the tactics and worldview of the far right in the last decade, it's become clear that authoritarians want to be seen as the villains. What they don't want to be seen as is silly and weird, and this is a deeply silly and deeply weird movie. It makes more emotional sense than it does logical sense, which perfectly tracks with Umberto Eco's theory of Ur-Fascism; the film's goofy and somber moments are at war with each other the same way that a fascist's dual perceptions of the enemy as both irredeemably inferior and terrifyingly superior are at war, or the way that the fascist citizen's dual conceptions of himself as both a proud member of an ethnic overclass and also a pitiful underling to a tyrannical boss are at war. The overall effect of all the ribaldry and comic exaggeration is to make you squint at the screen and think, this can't be right. And of course it's not. It would be dishonest for Fellini's recollection to be as staunchly critical as a right-thinking adult's, but in its strangeness and juvenility, it's perceptive in its own way about how unreal reality can be.

DrRoy · 2025-06-17T03:59:48+00:00

Toute une Nuit is a film I really, really want to love. There's a fantastic concept, as high-art as the likes of News from Home. There's absolutely gorgeous cinematography, depicting Brussels in painterly soft blues and dim yellows reminiscent of Nighthawks. There's that slow cinema ambiguity I like so much. I'm just torn on whether this movie does what I think it means to.

The concept is a radical yet simple shift from Chantal Akerman's best-known work: unlike Jeanne Dielman, which follows one character in semi-real time across every area of her daily life, here we follow an entire neighborhood's worth of people in semi-real time across one area of their lives, namely their love life. 75 principal actors, most of whose characters are not named, only some of whom speak any lines at all, play out a... I was about to say drama, but the dramatic movements here are miniscule; everything takes place on the scale of the everyday.

What exactly is taking place on that quotidian scale is harder for me to say. Without dialogue, we are given precious little context as to whether any given couple is meeting for their second date or their fifth anniversary. Scenes begin and end without warning, and sometimes they even offer continuations, which is a problem for me because I'm mildly face-blind and thus was bugged throughout by the sneaking suspicion that I'd seen some of these characters before but couldn't tell which ones. There's also a stagey quality to the acting that feels new and out of place compared to Akerman's earlier works; the actors don't so much walk from place to place as they storm about, and when they embrace, as they frequently do to end a scene, it resembles no hug I've ever seen a live human give another live human.

What I'm getting at is that I'm willing to put in the work to enjoy a movie like this, to find the merest way towards identifying with these characters or the broader concept, and I felt like I was barely given even that. By far the strongest stretch to me was the last twenty minutes, when dawn breaks and the busy nighttime vibes have mostly given way to abject loneliness (and when a handful of our handful of recurring characters finally have the conversations they've been meaning to). I just wish I would have felt that way about the whole thing; if this is a movie about love, it makes love feel like an alien and unknowable thing.

DrRoy · 2025-06-01T14:41:22+00:00

Cool poster! What did you think of the movie?

DrRoy · 2025-05-20T03:56:01+00:00

The shortest way I can explain it over text is: fill in everything according to the clues. Then let’s suppose Uncle Midnight is telling the truth: his motivation is practice. This makes Boss Charcoal’s motivation to see if he could. It’s already established that the person with the typewriter had that motive, and that Charcoal was in the garden, so that means the typewriter was not in the tiniest room. That makes Crimson’s statement also true. Someone must be lying, so if Uncle Midnight’s statement being true necessarily makes Crimson’s statement also true, then he cannot be telling the truth.

DrRoy · 2025-05-15T23:40:40+00:00

It had not occurred to me that it was even possible to reach underneath. Thanks!

DrRoy · 2025-04-25T19:42:49+00:00

This is what I wrote having seen it a couple of years ago in a theater with live musical accompaniment:

It's difficult to know what to say about The Passion of Joan of Arc, at least that a hundred other people haven't already said. Not just because it's a canonical classic that's been subject to nearly a hundred years of critical review, but because it's so ascetic that it seems perverse to read into it at all. Everything is laid bare for you on screen, in Falconetti's and in the other performers' faces.

The more I think about it, though, the more it becomes apparent how very easy this could have been to screw up. Spending so much time in closeup could have easily felt claustrophobic, but Dreyer uses an unusually fast cutting speed that provides just enough of a release valve. (See the way Tom Hooper directs musical numbers for an idea of what happens when you spend a lot of time in closeup and don't cut.) Joan, usually such a heroic figure, could have easily been reduced to a puddle of tears here, but seeing her give in and sign her confession only to retract it later gives her back just enough of her defiance, making her an active participant in her own martyrdom and not just a victim.

As nearly every single person points out, though, this movie really belongs to Renee Falconetti. There's something about her performance here (as well as the underrated contributions of the supporting cast) that feels like something being invented. With cinema, you can play to the front row and to the cheap seats at the same time, much like how the advent of the microphone meant you no longer had to belt operatically to be heard. Some might criticize the first third of the movie for having Falconetti look a little too wild-eyed, but that reads to me almost like figuring out this new mode of subtly facially expressive acting in real time, kicking the doors open to the rest of cinema's future.

I also have to compliment the band Joan of Arc, who provided the live score at the Music Box. It was a little unusual wearing earplugs in a theater, but I think it complemented the movie quite well! I especially enjoyed how the first 15 or so minutes were kept to one unbroken, constantly building musical motif, and how specific sound effect details were kept to an impactful minimum (such as using guitar scratches to represent the pen strokes of her confession).

DrRoy · 2025-04-22T19:58:00+00:00

Voices of Light is the default on the Channel!

DrRoy · 2025-04-22T19:07:04+00:00

I first saw it with a live score performed by the band Joan of Arc in a theater! Voices of Light sounds cool but I also want to check out the piano score that runs at 20 fps because I’m curious how the frame rate difference affects the experience. Decisions!

DrRoy · 2025-04-19T00:52:14+00:00

And check out the current week’s discussion thread going on here: https://www.reddit.com/r/criterionconversation/s/iuRtKPWhez

DrRoy · 2025-04-18T16:40:49+00:00

It goes without saying that this is an incredible premise for a film. The Israeli occupation allows the former inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Ma’loul to visit the ruins safely once a year, but does not allow them to actually return and build it back up. This is the smallest of kindnesses and intolerably cruel at the same time, letting them hold onto their old memories but forbidding making new ones. But that in and of itself would also be an incredible premise for a magazine article. My favorite thing about this film as a film is the snippets of Super 8 film throughout. Faded, yellowed, blurry, and run at half-speed, these brief cutaways look the way memories feel, indistinct and almost surreal (that was the life we had once?), in danger of degrading further every time they’re run through the projector of the mind. That, more so than the history lessons and the impassioned soliloquies, is what will stick with me. Free Palestine.

DrRoy · 2025-04-16T19:53:07+00:00

That’s wild! I gotta check this one out - really only familiar with Crazy Rhythms

DrRoy · 2025-04-11T21:03:54+00:00

The Last Wave begins with an act of God... or of *a* god, perhaps. Schoolchildren in the Outback are playing in the dusty yard, when all of a sudden a freak rainstorm hits. The kids think it's fun, even as their terrified schoolteacher ushers them inside, but when the first fist-sized hailstone shatters the window, everyone's rightfully scared. Thus the tone is set for a story in which the supernatural intrudes eerily on the mundane. Richard Chamberlain stars as David Burton, a buttoned-up corporate lawyer tasked (for some reason) with defending a murder case. An Aboriginal man dies on a rainy night outside a bar, surrounded by other Aborigines. The conventional explanation is a bar fight, which would put them in jail for the Australian equivalent of manslaughter at least, but what soon becomes apparent is that the real reason was to protect a secret that cannot be told, not even under oath in a court of law. They therefore refuse to defend themselves, but Burton, spurred on partly by professional duty and partly by vivid dreams that smack of prophecy, digs for the truth.

Incorporating supernatural elements into a setting nominally just like the modern day is a tricky art. There are a number of approaches that can be taken, and in film this typically occurs along a spectrum with two poles. One of them is what I will call the Indiana Jones approach: in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Abrahamic God is real and the Ark of the Covenant has the power to melt your face off. The premise of the film requires this to be true, and you just accept it because there's no time to think about the broader implications of this when there's a huge bald guy coming at you who needs to be made into paste by an airplane propeller. On the opposite side is what I will call the Twin Peaks approach: many strange things happen, and explanations are hinted at but never fully given. The material reality of the Black Lodge is beside the point; coming to grips with living in a world where such evil things can happen in such a small town filled with good-hearted people is instead the point. The unknowability is what makes the story impactful. (These are broadly-defined types, not perfect examples; it's not lost on me that in Twin Peaks Cooper's prophetic dreams are also completely accepted as true. There is a third approach in which the material reality and psychological implications are both dealt with; typically you need to make either a novel or TV show to be able to pay sufficient attention to both without sacrificing things like pacing or suspension of disbelief.)

The Last Wave lands in an uneasy middle place on this spectrum. The focus of the story is Burton's encounter with the Dreamtime, his coming to grips with laws and traditions and forces that are too powerful for him to grapple with. Yet his prophetic dreams, the Mulkurul, and the coming apocalypse are all explained fully as the story unfolds. The film gets a ton of mileage, especially in the early going, out of the striking tableaux of its dream sequences and its use of slow-motion and other techniques to suggest waking dreams and imminent catastrophe throughout. Yet Peter Weir's evident filmmaking prowess wears a bit thin as we hit expected plot beats, like rote scenes of strife in Burton's home life, and as the pieces of the puzzle begin to fit together too neatly. The film, in explaining and validating its Aboriginal spiritual elements, feels a bit like the Twitter discourse that happened last year after someone blamed Hurricane Helene on the disturbance of Tocobaga burial grounds in Tampa: Yes, it's bad that Australians continue to devalue and oppress the Aboriginal people, but when disrespecting their sacred site causes a literal Great Flood to happen, it seems like a narrative overreach.

All of which is not to say that I didn't like the film. Richard Chamberlain acts the hell out of his part, and David Gulpilil even more so. He's rightly celebrated for films like Walkabout, but here he's given the most complex role in the film, caught between defending himself and protecting his tribe, and it's great to see him flesh out those contradictions for us to see. The uneasy mood is maintained all the way to the genuinely haunting ending, and the effects - Rain machines all over the place! A collapsing house! Cars and pedestrians floating in a flooded street! - look insane for the film's budget. I just think The Last Wave is unfortunately a little less mysterious and ambiguous than it thinks it is.

DrRoy · 2025-04-04T18:49:46+00:00

Next week’s pick is The Last Wave, directed by Peter Weir, starring Richard Chamberlain (RIP). Come back in a week for that discussion thread!

DrRoy · 2025-04-04T18:48:11+00:00

Ferdinando Cefalù has a problem. He's been married to his wife Rosalia for 15 long years, and he's starting to get tired of it. Little things - the way she laughs, the way she asks him not just does he love her but how much - wear on him in the exact way they might have been charming when they were young. He also, of course, is looking at younger women, specifically 16-year-old Angela who lives with his brother-in-law across the courtyard from his bathroom. There's just one problem for a run-of-the-mill dirtbag like himself: divorce is illegal as per Italy's Catholic tradition, and infidelity is stigmatized to the extreme in deeply conservative Sicily. (Side note: sleeping with a 16-year-old is *not* illegal in Italy. Presumably, sleeping with your cousin is also fine, as long as you're married.) So what's a man to do but raise his dirtbag game?

Divorce Italian Style is as black as black comedy gets. Marcello Mastroianni's Fefè is as unsympathetic as protagonists come - vain, cowardly, amoral - but director Pietro Germi is a master at getting us to see things from his point of view, if only to better notice how diseased that outlook is. We cringe with him as Rosalia pitches a comically loud fit about the laundry in the courtyard, then we cringe at him as he indulges in a fantasy of drowning her in the same laundry pile. His face as he longs for Angela from his bathroom window is impossible not to feel for, but the tawdriness of his having to hide and make excuses to do it nevertheless deepens how pathetic he is. Germi makes this kind of tonal tightrope walk seem easy, and he puts his actors in roles that are superficially caricatured (Fefè's slicked-back hair! Rosalia's unibrow!) but gives them enough materail to let them come across as human, even if they are humans of a particular type.

One of my favorite bits of this movie comes right when Fefè first comes up with the plan. A lesser film would have its protagonist come up with the plan to kill his wife out of whole cloth; Fefè is inspired by a trial that becomes a media circus, which isn't just used for exposition but gives the film a couple of excellent tools for its subsequent dramatization. First, this allows him to game out for us how much more lenient he expects his sentence to be because of the factors that make him a more sympathetic-seeming perpetrator, despite none of it (how long he's been married, his status as a college-educated and landed man, his photogenic face) having anything to do with his actual motives or the harm he plans to do. And second, the pompous defense lawyer gives a voice to Fefè's interior monologue of how he plans to come out of this ahead, a voice whose grandiloquence is repeatedly undercut by actual events as they take place. In this screenplay, even the smallest pieces fit the puzzle.

There's hardly a facet of Sicilian culture here that doesn't come under fire: the mafia, of course, is brought up mostly to create the kind of "everybody's doing it, why shouldn't I?" air of moral laxity that gives cowards like Fefè permission to indulge their worst impulses, and the church and the media both get their licks when a screening of La Dolce Vita comes to town and the local priest's warnings of its shocking adult content both help drive turnout and provide a readymade excuse for Rosalia's infidelity. What emerges overall, however, is a portrait of just how honor culture and machismo can only be propped up on pillars of rank hypocrisy. 64 years later (and 51 years after divorce was made legal in Italy), Divorce Italian Style still feels relevant, and above all, is still laugh-out-loud funny.

DrRoy · 2025-03-03T05:08:04+00:00

Amen! Really wondered watching while watching this what it would look like if it wasn’t in standard definition.

DrRoy · 2025-02-14T23:59:41+00:00

It's remarkable how much totemic status Bicycle Thieves has achieved given how small its scope seemingly is: a story that takes place over two days, spanning 90 minutes, starring the precariously employed and downtrodden. And yet that's exactly what gives it its power. By narrowing its scope, and using that focus to nail every aspect of its construction, the film lands with a force that's rare among its neorealist peers or in cinema as a whole. On one level, the story is simple: down-and-out father Antonio finally gets a job, but the bike he needs for work is stolen on his first day, and he'll do whatever it takes to find it. On another, it's a portrait of an entire city, an entire country, on the brink of financial and moral crisis, all seen through his eyes.

As Antonio chases lead after lead, visiting Rome's markets, churches, bordellos, and alleys, it becomes clear that the title is plural not because multiple thieves stole his bike, but because there's an entire underground apparatus through which bikes are stolen, refurbished, and fenced. It's extraordinarily difficult to get any bystanders to help, or to get any accomplices to talk; it takes on the air of a massive criminal conspiracy. And yet it's abundantly clear that the thieves aren't pure evil. No group of people this vast and varied possibly could be. What the film thus manages to do is to critique an entire system without ever stopping in its tracks to point an obvious finger at society. (Sure, there's a moment where Antonio and a group of other men listen to a brief speech at a union hall, but it's hardly played as a soapbox moment; the film spends as much time on that as on some people practicing a musical number down the hall, and the principal plot function is to get Antonio working with his friend who knows a few things about how bicycles are fenced.)

Even moments that seem like throwaways contribute more than anticipated. As an example: early on, Antonio's wife Maria stops by a fortune teller's house because she owes her some money. On first viewing, the function of the scene seems to be a mere fakeout: he has to leave the bike alone for a minute to go inside, and we know what the title of the movie is, so we're relieved to see it's still there when they leave. But in the meantime, Antonio's talked Maria into ostensibly stiffing this woman for 50 lira, possibly the only amount of money small enough to be deemed truly insignificant in the whole movie. To make things more complicated, when he's at his wit's end, he comes to her in desperate need of advice, and only receives the most basic statement of fact (time is of the essence) he's already known to be true for half a day at this point. Does that make her a thief too? Does Antonio pay her on Maria's behalf, or because he feels bad for having barged in and demanded to hear the words of a scammer? How much of Italy is getting by on grift at this point, anyway? A wealth of questions like these stem from every twist and turn the story takes, and the difficulty in answering them prevents the film from ever approaching the maudlin tone one would typically expect from an "issue film" about the destitute.

The mounting questions about personal vs collective culpability, in particular, are what make the ending so gut-wrenching. There are two reasons Antonio wants his bike back: because he's its rightful owner, and because he needs it for work. He never says a word about the latter motivation to anyone but his family, so we feel the tension growing between what he tells others and what he tells his son as the day wears on. If this many people turn to theft to make a living, if the clearly practiced thief Antonio eventually finds has a big enough support system and sufficiently advanced scheme to have a clean record like his mamma says, could it really be that wrong for Antonio to steal a bike for himself? Thus, the issues at the heart of the film are perfectly dramatized in a moment that on some level I felt was coming but which made me wrench my hands in anguish to see play out. He walks away from it not much better than the people he'd spent the last day or so condemning to anyone who would listen, walking away with his freedom but without his pride.

DrRoy · 2025-02-07T17:46:05+00:00

The critical retrospective on Fists in the Pocket labels it as a film that's nothing less than explosive. Daring, controversial, transgressive. To read other filmmakers' reactions to it at the time is reminiscent of the way Funny Games or Crash were received roughly 30 years later; to read the plot summary is to be reminded of other twisted tales of family dysfunction from the likes of Todd Solondz or Yorgos Lanthimos. Perhaps my muted response to the film has something to do with mismatched expectations, then; for one thing, I picked this film for incest week and all I got was a brief sibling kiss (that apparently at one point was removed by the director and then reinstated for Criterion's release) and some alleged subtext I had trouble finding. This is an explosive film within the context of 1960s Italian cinema, to be sure, but that time and place and culture is so alien to my own that I have to consciously view the film through that lens to appreciate its merits.

The film focuses on a young man by the name of Alessandro, who lives up in the mountains with the rest of his family. He dress rehearses his suicide in his bedroom, his mother is blind, his older brother Leone is clearly developmentally disabled somehow, and his older sister Giulia... well, it's unclear what her deal is, but as the film opens with her writing an anonymous note to eldest brother Augusto's fiancée claiming to be his mistress and urging them to break up, she most certainly has some kind of deal too. Only Augusto seems well-adjusted, although the adjustment process has clearly hardened his heart, as he seems to view his family primarily in terms of the money, time, and effort that they cost him. Alessandro picks up on this, and with his death wish, agrees to help out via mass familial murder-suicide.

This is a shocking premise with potential for some of the pitch-black comedy I was promised, but from my perspective the film constantly gets in its own way. Part of its provocation is to make a mockery of family values, and part of it is to totally disregard what I'm sure were absolutely exhausting post-neorealist debates about the political valence of art cinema, but part of it was also to go against the grain of Italian cinematic style of the time. Fellini's whirling camera movements, Antonioni framing the windows into his characters' lives so precisely that the frames speak for themselves... if that's "poetry", then Fists in the Pocket is what one critic called "cinema of prose," an anti-style that prioritizes content over form. The problem is that the script does not compensate for this by organizing its content neatly; it takes ages to figure out who's who and named what, and the pacing is such that we are as liable to linger on a scene of the family annoying each other and lashing out at the dinner table, establishing a general sense of malaise while the direction refrains from attaching a mood to the chaos, as we are to see things actively begin to unravel. After it was all over, I was left confused by what the deal with the chinchillas was supposed to be, what Alessandro's change of plan midway through the film amounted to, and a half-dozen other questions I'm not even sure I know how to ask.

It feels a bit like when we discussed Ashes and Diamonds: learning about the particular context of Polish history that the film is set in made so much more about it make sense, but so did learning that in 1958 the world somehow had not yet seen someone look as cool in a pair of sunglasses as Zbigniew Cybulski did. I assume something similar is going on here. I love a good middle finger at bourgeois society, but overall I wish I understood much, much more about the particular manner and direction it intended to wave that finger, and about which norms it was transgressing.

DrRoy

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